If there’s a more Irish-American novel published this year, it’ll be something to behold. The narrator’s mother gets a sadness in her eyes whenever she passes a monument of her youth that’s fallen into disrepair. The narrator’s older brother, Tommy, turned into an “asshole” when he became a teenager – surly, delinquent, dismissive of his family. He records recent fishing trips and neighbourhood baseball games alongside older childhood memories and family anecdotes going back decades. The layers of nostalgia threaten to become overbearing at times but Burns’s plain, unfussy style keeps a lid on it.

Source: The Guardian January 16, 2026 17:31 UTC